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In a Dallas courtroom on Thursday, writer and activist Barrett Brown was sentenced to 63 months in prison and was ordered to pay a little more than $890,000 in restitution and fines, according to reports.

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The danger is that users might enter their credit card information to purchase the fake software, James said. If a user does, the website may harvest their account information.

The website does not yet include a downloadable trojan, but James predicted that there will probably be one added at some point.

Intego discovered that the website is a near word-for-word spin-off of another malicious website that promotes “Winiguard,” another fake security program.

The Macguard domain was registered Sept. 18 to the same person registered for the Winiguard site, James said.

That site, according to Sunbelt Software, falsely informs users that their Windows machines are infected with viruses in hopes of duping them to purchase the rogue product. If they do so, their machines may become infected with malware and face degraded performance.

Some 30 million PCs are infected with some form rogue software, stealing $10 to $15 million a month from people who are desperate to disinfect their PCs, Ryan Sherstobitoff, chief corporate evangelist at Panda Security told SCMagazineUS.com Friday.

“It's probably the biggest profit-driving system we have seen in years,” Sherstobitoff said.

The majority of these threats target Windows users, but that could change as the Mac user base increases, he said.

James said the threat is already growing and as Apple's market share increases, targeting Mac users is becoming more lucrative for malware creators.

“Mac users are much more complacent in dealing with security issues than Windows users because they are not as used to dealing with these dangers,” he said.

The potentially malicious Macguard site

The Macguard site had some obvious indicators it is fake. The graphic on the site is of a Dell computer with an Apple logo placed on it, according to Intego. In addition, the website is riddled with typos and mentions having “Full Mac OS X Security Center Support” when there is actually no Mac security feature by this name.

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